Foreword
Growing up is everyone’s assignment.
Adulting is the finish line of the eighteenish-year marathon called parenting. Over those years, a metamorphosis happens. Repeated since the first newborn after Eden is a physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and relational transformation. It feels miraculous.
Moms and dads of babies to parents of teens are continually learning about themselves. The “grown-up” people see with new eyes and change as their littles become bigs and then take flight. Yes, kids need parents, but God gives us parents the gift of our kids to help us finish growing up to be like him. Becoming integrated, balanced, and healthy like Jesus is God’s goal for all his people—children and parents alike.
There is a seeming paradox in parenting. Our children come to us 100 percent dependent; they would literally die without our devoted attention. But in the end, when they become 100 percent independent, we realize so little was really in our control. Eric Peterson writes, “In ways that continue to astound me, God consistently chooses to accomplish divine purposes through the agency of human imperfection.”1 A perfect summary of parenting.
But there are no perfect parents. Even God, who is the perfect parent, has a house full of flawed, authority-resistant, blame-casting children. Welcome to the ride!
The great news is we are not alone! Everyone faces the same or similar dilemmas. Parents, like starving children, eagerly absorb stories from friends about their own experiences. There is nothing like the comfort of trusted friends. Your small group, book club girlfriends, neighbors, or siblings can be that someone who listens and shares advice from their lessons learned.
But I especially hope Janel can be that friend to you too as you add her wisdom to other sources you collect. Reading her book was for me like sharing a small table in a kitchen or coffee shop and brainstorming ideas like we’ve done over writing projects in the past. I heard her eager-to-help voice.
Janel is one supercreative woman. She has never been afraid to try new ideas. She’s the champion of making lists: ways to keep kids busy, ideas for loving your spouse, or questions to ask your kids. This book is full of multiple-choice options for every season of parenting. It is also full of well-reasoned, God-is-with-us-and-wants-to-help-us verses to guide in every issue you will face with your kids.
While our children are with us, our assignment is to invest fully in their lives, to know them, and to lead them to the care of God himself. Their very lives and eternal future depend on it.
“The years are short,” someone said about parenting. And it is true. So I encourage you to ask God to guide you to the wisdom in this book that you need today for your child or children. Allow yourself to be challenged to try new things. Be encouraged that you can make a lasting difference for good in your little ones. And don’t give up and quit. I promise it will be worth it in the end. And God says so too: “Let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9 ESV).
Barbara Rainey
Coauthor of
The Art of Parenting
Introduction
“Dad, where do babies come from?”
“Why doesn’t Grandma believe in God?”
“Can men get pregnant? That guy looks pregnant.”
“Does everything die? Even you and Dad?”
“Are you a boy or a girl?”
“Is Santa real?”
Parenting is complicated. So I’ll do what I can to make it easier.
It was the season we’d been waiting for. We toted stadium chairs and water bottles, smeared on sunscreen, and invited the family. My son Baden, all paleblond curls and Bambi-size blue eyes, yanked on a shirt three sizes too big and strapped shin guards above preschool cleats. My husband, John, was a killer in soccer; I’m fairly confident we’d purchased a youth soccer ball before the kid could walk.
When the throaty whistle sounded, my son’s legs rotated in high gear. We soon saw he seemed to fall down a lot on purpose and enjoyed bodychecking the other four-year-olds. (That was at least one conversation with him on the sidelines.) But the grin, the apple-red cheeks, and the smell of little-boy sweat in his hair? Golden.
The inevitable moment came either in that game or the next—I can’t remember. He powered a shot directly into the goal. Victorious! The crowd goes wild!
Only of course it didn’t, because, hey. Oops. Wrong goal.
That kid’s a teenager now, hopefully not smiting too many young women with those eyes. I wish the goals for our kids were still peewee-sized.
As parents, we help our kids aim for certain goals. We make sacrifices in the form of events and practices and particular diets and I’ll-have-to-subtract-this-from-your-college-fund uniforms and equipment. Or music or academics or Scouts or pure survival. We cut hot dogs in pieces so they won’t choke. We teach them to clean the toilet well instead of disgustingly. We show them how to drive in a downpour and avoid turning underwear a pale pink in the laundry.
We concentrate on the goals that matter in the moment.
But what if in focusing on the immediate and the seemingly urgent, we miss the best?
If we don’t play this parenting game strategically, we’ll hit someone’s goals. But they might not be the ones we intended. Worse, we may miss out on winning the game of our kids’ lifetime.
How can we make space for what matters eternally? How can we squirrel away life skills in our kids that make them want to connect with God? Could spiritual life skills be as natural to them as brushing their teeth (okay, I’m still reminding my 13-year-old) or putting their clothes in the hamper? (Yikes. Maybe not that one either.)
Enter Real Life: Making Space for the Right Goals
Over sixteen years and two continents, my husband, John, and I have sweated and conditioned ourselves for God’s long game—trusting that whatever good work God has begun in our kids, he will bring to a winning finish (Philippians 1:6). Our part has been anything but error-free. Sometimes we fumble and feel far from a win. And our opponents (spiritual, cultural, internal within us, internal within our kids) are real.
Meanwhile, my family is trying to survive as much as yours. There are chores to supervise—and cleaning with kids in the house, as the saying goes, is like brushing one’s teeth while eating Oreos. There’s schoolwork to monitor and correct. (“No, there is no such thing as a kilomoleter. Or a hoxagon.”) There are attitudes and inane squabbles I occasionally wish I could trade in for a pair of power heels. As it is, Lego shrapnel skewers the soles of my feet. And I recently found my teenager’s toenail clipping on the table.
But these aren’t the issues that concern me most. I can probably get my kids to scrub dishes, do their homework, and maybe even clean up Legos. (If I can’t, maybe the military?) Yet, what if I fail to teach them what really matters—like the faith, hope, and love that don’t fade (1 Corinthians 13:13)? What if they leave our house of insanity with a prayer lifestyle resembling a stiff visit to an elderly grandparent? What if their sexual values end up more smudgy than my bathroom mirror? What if my kids stink at apologizing, thus trailing broken relationships behind them instead of just random dirty gym socks?
This book came about not because any of us need more stuff to do but because our kids need spiritual life skills. We can seize small moments to teach our children these skills, like we would with, well, the toenail clipping. (Sometimes teaching a life skill looks like “Here is what not to do.”) We can create space for what matters and work toward the most important goals—the right ones.
But first, let’s divvy up what your responsibility is and where that responsibility ends.
What Not to Do (and What You Can’t)
At the writing of this book, John and I corral four kids, ages ten to fifteen. In case you’re doing the math, no, there are no twins. But a couple of them felt like twins. I homeschooled my kids for eight years—five and a half of those years in Uganda, carting them to the refugee center, playing Scripture memory songs in the minivan (#thatmom) as I dodged potholes the size of a small child.
Today, back in the States, John and I try to choose heartfelt conversations with the kids when we’d rather go to bed and let our eyes glaze over on Netflix. And sometimes I hope that all this intentionality is giving my kids a shed of tools to cultivate God in their lives.
But he alone makes any seed sprout.
Author and pastor Dave Harvey writes, “One of the less detected strains of legalism in the church today is the false hope of ‘deterministic parenting.’ This unspoken but deeply felt dogma assumes the parents’ faithfulness determines the spiritual health of their kids…Such legalism smuggles in a confidence that God rewards faithful parents with obedient, converted kids and does so proportionally to what we deserve.”1
We’re not entitled to God waking our kids’ hearts. You may read someday that one of my kids is a prodigal. Some of God’s children certainly are. My kids make their own choices—one of them may either be president someday or lead all the other felons in prison—and God alone holds sovereign rule over their lives. The spectacular goal of my kids loving God with their lives can’t become…my idol. I must love him whether they do or not. Though I possess no power to change my kids’ hearts, I long to be faithful—approved and unashamed (2 Timothy 2:15)—with the gift of my kids. His kids.
Catch Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 3:6: “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow.” We could say, My spouse and I planted. All those camp counselors and crazy youth group leaders and grandparents and babysitters watered. But God gave the growth.
Life Skills Versus the Heart
If God alone gives the growth, our slaving away isn’t what matters. We think success must be around here somewhere if our kids would just behave. We feel that icy hand of fear whipping us into shape as a parent, lashing our backs, threatening with what could be. In those moments, we are rarely compelled by love; we are prodded and provoked by the concern snapping at our heels, by our performance as parents somehow making us acceptable to God. And our kids feel the difference.
Fear snags my attention to how my kids perform. It focuses my zoom lens on the amount of control I have, causing me to resort to force if required. It swivels my eyes to behavior modification rather than the cultivation of hearts—theirs and mine—that spread and bloom toward God.
When I parent out of fear, I shape a familial atmosphere of fear-birthed “should,” of outward-facing laws rather than kindness leading to repentance (Romans 2:4). My kids’ behavior is never enough because my starting premise is one of my own (unattainable) performance rather than the security of God’s acceptance of us (see Romans 3:20).
Author and pastor Reb Bradley writes wisely about the priorities, fears, and blind spots that drive our parenting. He asserts, “God doesn’t want us to trust in principles, methods, or formulas, no matter how ‘biblical’ they seem. God wants us to trust in Him!”2
But there are more caveats to our earnest discipleship methods, he cautions. As Paul reminds, “I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me” (Romans 7:21). So consider this my massive red flag waving, my untoned triceps flapping, before you start a single one of the ideas in the following chapters. Our desires to raise godly kids can develop the insidious underbelly of feeding our own street cred. Bradley observes, “When we elevate the image of the family, we effectively trade our children’s hearts for our reputation.”3
In teaching these spiritual life skills to my kids, I try to be supersensitive to how they’re responding, so I—and eventually God—can have their hearts: “My son, give me your heart and let your eyes delight in my ways” (Proverbs 23:26). Pushing a discipline, if it’s not the right time or the right kid, doesn’t love my kids well. It loves them blindly.
Loving the Sweat: How Much Do I Ask of My Kids?
Imagine yourself as a personal trainer. If someone was “sort of” interested in losing weight, you wouldn’t push too hard. They may not come back to the gym. Instead of barking at them, you’d try everything from Zumba to speed walking to find a workout they loved. You’d celebrate every victory, and sometimes, in faith, leave a challenging skill for a better time. But those athletes used to running marathons? They’ll breeze through that training and raise you 20 push-ups. They’ll eat up your Peloton pace.
So we adapt spiritual training in a similar way. Remember that little warning before a video workout? It’s something like “Check with your doctor and don’t do any of these things that would cause you to sue us.” Here’s mine: Before training your kids in these life skills, examine their personalities and current level of response to God, their God-given inclinations and curiosities, their motivations and resistance—so “get those knees up!” isn’t the only exercise in your repertoire.
And as our kids age, our training methods should change. We move to more of a coaching role on the sidelines, allowing them to play more of the game.
Baden, my oldest, is more autonomous than I ever was (except maybe that time I deliberately peed in the corner to make my mom mad). He’s also more independent than my younger three, who ask me to pray with them or read them a verse before they leave for school and will memorize Scripture for rewards. To encourage Baden with the same methods would shove him away from me…and God.
I grimace to think of my kids associating the spiritual with exasperation, lifeless boredom, straitlaced have tos, tucked-in appearances (like Spanx beneath workout clothes), and an overexuberant mother.
The ideas in this book are simply ways to work out Deuteronomy 6 in our homes. They’re ways for the Word to be on our hearts—maybe more constantly in mind than the chirp of text alerts or the endless question of what’s for dinner—and taught diligently to our kids:
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).
These life skills are taught by talking about God’s words when we sit, walk, drive, lie down, rise—and posting them around our homes. Consider the Word as a tea bag in the water of your environment, soaking further and further into the marrow of your kids.
In our daily spiritual activities, we train our kids to see God as the engaging, desirable person he is, to see past the metaphorical potato chips around them to the pricey, daily, organic, five-course meal that satisfies for a lifetime. These life skills reveal God not as some distant cloud-sitter but as the God who lives among us, who “moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14 MSG).
Kids are likely to see spiritual life skills as a way of life if they’re just always there, modeled by your authentic, daily all-in-ness with your own faith. James K.A. Smith summarizes two psychologists’ work on automaticities—unconscious habits:
We can acquire automaticities unintentionally; that is, dispositions and habits can be inscribed in our unconscious if we regularly repeat routines and rituals that we fail to recognize as formative “practices.” So there can be all sorts of automating going on that we do not choose and of which we are not aware but that nevertheless happen because we are regularly immersed in environments loaded with such formative rituals.4
And those “automaticities” don’t just stop with our kids. As an ancient Jewish quote reads, “When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son.”
“Catching the Bug”: What We Learn with Pleasure, We Never Forget
I loved my freshman year of Spanish. The teacher was personable and clearly enjoyed her job. Sophomore year, I wasn’t so lucky. It is entirely possible that the teacher loathed me and my classmates. All of us probably would have rather had a mole removed than attend that class.
But because I’d “caught the bug,” my love for Spanish propelled me past La Clase de Drudgery to continue in my own studies, eventually find a tutor, and make a mission trip to Venezuela.
Remember “positive association” from Intro to Psych? It’s when we think something is good (or with “negative association,” bad) because we experienced happy things when we encountered it. Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me showed that kids who’d created great memories in a McDonald’s PlayPlace kept coming back for the food as adults; they associated all those fries and McNuggets with childhood pleasure and being loved. What we learn and enjoy, we remember.
What do our kids associate with God? His Word? Church? Will our kids associate spiritual life skills with tasting and seeing that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8)? If I can be the loving teacher who helps them “catch the bug” of a certain life skill, they’ll be self-driven to learn and experience it the rest of their lives.
Each one of my kids has taken a permanent marker to the walls, banister, or dining room table. Teaching them spiritual life skills is my way of scrawling on the walls of their brains in my own version of permanent marker. I’m illustrating, even to their subconscious, the delight that is God. If you think this sounds like payback for all that scrubbing, please know that I never want this to rub off.
Even more, if the central idea you internalize from this book is “Try harder” or even “Try smarter,” I will have failed. It is God who begins this mind-blowing work in your family. He will also grow it into unerasable completion.
How to Use This Book
Each chapter in this book focuses on a core principle kids need to learn from us. Pick and choose skills you want to focus on in the order that works for you (but do start with identity, chapter 1). Focus on each skill, and do an activity or two. Then move on. Some of these skills take a lifetime to learn, so feel free to return to them frequently, and maybe try different activities. Each chapter also includes these features:
•Permanent Truth. Consider these my bullet points of each life skill.
•Writing on the Wall: Practical Ideas. Here you’ll find practical ideas to implement each life skill. Pick one idea that would work for your family’s subculture, listening to the Holy Spirit. Some of these ideas offer baby steps for various age groups, attention spans, and abilities. Rather than expecting our kids to, say, jump right into a two-day fast, you’d implement “training wheels” of delaying gratification, fasting for one meal, or having a simple meal on a regular basis, like beans and rice. I’ve tried to envision ways to stair-step into fuller life skills as kids age.
•Fresh Ink: Resources for Vibrant Faith. These books, printables, websites, videos, and more hand you creative ways to bring these skills to life in your kids—or just prompt them to dive deeper.
•True Colors: Discussion Questions for Kids. These questions are for you as the parent to ask your kids. We’re all more likely to take ownership of an idea if we arrive at it ourselves. These discussion questions get kids thinking about the whys and hows of each life skill.
•Think Ink: Contemplative Questions for Parents. These questions are for you as a parent (though older kids may appreciate them too). They are designed to help you do the hard work of internalizing these skills rather than building a family of really good spiritual fakers.
•Prayer of the Dependent Parent. Reading these ideas for discipling your kids, you might at times feel like you’re drinking from a fire hydrant (a metaphor occasionally used to refer to my abundance of ideas). This part of each chapter is to continually remind us that salvation belongs to God alone (Revelation 7:10); he is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25). Even in our best efforts, we’re 100 percent dependent on him to create new growth in our kids.
•Group Discussion Questions. Though it’s countercultural to invite anyone’s opinions into our parenting, my half a decade in Africa (for a number of reasons) increased my appreciation for parenting in community—for other voices in my kids’ lives and my own, hopefully addressing some of my blind spots. These questions help you process these concepts in community, hopefully raising your kids with others of like mind.
And just like that, you’ve got this. Onward.